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Batman Begins (2005)

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From Time Out London

Christopher Nolan’s films (‘Following’, ‘Memento’, ‘Insomnia’) are about the dependence of identity on narrative: we know who we are only because of the stories we make of our own lives. With ‘Batman Begins’, Nolan successfully applies this mode to a character who is essentially a self-crafted living legend – and, in the process, reinvigorates a franchise that had been lost in self-pastiche. ‘Batman Begins’ is a film of two halves, if not quite dual identity. Nolan’s touch is more plainly evident in the first hour, a confidently non-chronological narrative covering Bruce Wayne’s privileged childhood, his parents’ murder and the self-doubt that leads him from Gotham’s underworld to a Himalayan backwater, where Liam Neeson pops up to offer enlightenment and ninja training on behalf of mysterious guru-potentate Ra’s al Ghul. Suitably honed, Bruce (Christian Bale) returns home to take advantage of Wayne Enterprises’ curiously neglected combat research facilities. Only then does the familiar pointy-eared persona coalesce and the narrative straighten out accordingly. The latter half offers a more conventional (and cluttered) city-in-peril plot, pitching the novice crimefighter against Cillian Murphy’s psycho psychiatrist, ‘the Scarecrow’, whose fear toxin threatens to plunge Gotham into anarchy. Bale is impressively cagey as Wayne, consciously knitting his neuroses into a weaponised identity so as to fight fear with fear. The degree of psychological plausibility this offers is complemented by a more realistic design than Tim Burton’s gothic stylisation or Joel Schumacher’s hollow gigantism: the Asian sequences offer muddy scuffles on damp plains as well as pretty ice fields, while favela-like slums sprawl beneath Gotham’s deco-style mass transit system. The muscular grit of the action sequences is leavened with nicely judged sarky banter – with Michael Caine’s butler Alfred and Morgan Freeman’s boffin Lucius – but it’s the nightmare images that linger: add just a whisper of fear gas and this is a bat out of hell who relishes the whiff of terror.

Author: BW

Time Out London Issue 1817: June 15-22 2005

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